Douglas Coupland works on “Vortex” at the Vancouver Aquarium. (Photo courtesy of Ocean Wise)
Canada's big environmental show of the year, of course, was Anthropocene, stunning photographs from around the world by Toronto artist Edward Burtynsky.
On view at both the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto into the New Year, the work is being exposed to even wider audiences through a documentary film and two books of the same title.
Burtynsky's massive project, completed with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, looks at everything from the extinction of the white rhino to the impact of forestry, mining and agriculture, exploring an era in which human activities are reshaping the planet in unprecedented and dangerous ways.
Meanwhile, in Western Canada, another art star, Douglas Coupland, created Vortex, a large installation on view at the Vancouver Aquarium until May. It's a commentary on the perils of plastic waste – whether the island of floating garbage in the Pacific Ocean or trash that washes up on the once-pristine beaches of Haida Gwaii and elsewhere on Canada's coastline.
Other environmentally themed projects of note include a permanent outdoor sound installation in downtown Calgary by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp that's based on data from a retreating glacier in the Rockies. “It is a kind of rift in public space," Thorp says. "You are at once at the edge of the ice of the Bow Glacier, and in the midst of tall skyscrapers filled with oil and gas company offices. You have one foot in the Pleistocene, the other in the Anthropocene."
Lori Goldberg, “Visitation,” 2018, acrylic on canvas, 40" x 30"
And, at the South Main Gallery in Vancouver, painter Lori Goldberg looked at the mounting problem of human waste in her show, Poetics of the Discarded.
Themes of environmental change or anxiety ran through other shows, including Peter von Tiesenhausen's survey, Songs of Pythagoras, at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton; Marsha Kennedy's Afterlight, at the Slate Fine Art Gallery in Regina; and Deborah Thompson's Pan-dulum: A Call to Unreason, at the Kootenay Gallery of Art in Castlegar, B.C.
Some shows focused more on the relationship between human endeavour and the environment, such as Supernatural: Art, Technology and the Forest, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; and If the river ran upwards at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff. It looked at industrial activity through the lens of water.
Patrick Dunford, “The Impossible Railroad Near Ocotillo,” 2016, oil on canvas, 24” x 30”
Two other shows sounded similar concerns. Patrick Dunford's painting show at Calgary's Jarvis Hall Gallery, Difficult Terrain, explored tree planting in British Columbia and the construction of the Impossible Railroad near his new home in California. And Florin Hategan's show Wetlands, at Edmonton's Harcourt House, featured meticulous prints of marshes littered with industrial debris.
Landscape painting, of course, remains a major genre in Canadian art, particularly for artists selling through commercial galleries, hardly a surprise given the Group of Seven's lasting legacy and Canada's immense natural beauty.
Toronto-based Monica Tap gave the form a unique twist by combining landscapes from photographs, historical paintings and her own memories to create the dreamy new scenes in her show, Arrangement, at Edmonton's Peter Robertson Gallery.
Arnold Shives' show, and they faded into the landscape, at the Seymour Art Gallery in North Vancouver, included paintings that offer a layered exploration of mountainous terrain.
Other landscape painters featured in Galleries West in the past year include Edmonton's Erin Elizabeth Ross at Gibson Fine Art in Calgary; and two artists who also own galleries, Jasper's Wendy Wacko at the Scott Gallery in Edmonton, and Darrell Bell, at his gallery in Saskatoon. Meanwhile, Calgary's Kate Mountford played with the interface of painting and photography in her mountain imagery at the Edge Gallery in Canmore, Alta.
Patricia Johnston, "Western Isle Beach," 2018, oil on canvas, 36" x 48"
Some artists focused explicitly on the sublime. Transcendental seascapes by Vancouver painter Patricia Johnston at Victoria's West End Gallery were one example.
Another was a photography show at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Encounters With the Sublime, which featured black-and-white images of Yukon's Kluane National Park by American alpinist Bradford Washburn and, half a century later, Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Selgado.
Work like this, while not overtly a commentary on environmental crisis, is a powerful reminder of what we stand to lose. ■